To Link or Not To Link?

If you are thinking about starting a corporate blog (or already have one), one of the questions you'll have to answer is: “should we link our corporate blog from our corporate web site?”

In this posting I will explore the two extreme options you have: Link or No Link.

I use the term “extreme” here because you actually have various degrees of linking. You can put a clear message on your most visited page (typically your home page), make your blog part of the main navigation or on the contrary burry it somewhere in your “about” section.

I believe the answer will depend on the following factors:

• the key objectives you have with your core site and your corporate blog (do you sell on your core site or just provide information, how “corporate” is your site),
• timing (yours and the overall blogosphere’s),
• the level of risks you are ready to take,
• the amount of resource you can dedicate to your blog.
  

Option 1: No Link
I think it is perfectly okay to completely isolate your corporate blog from your corporate site and to not even highlight it on your corporate site. As long as you are making it very clear that your blog is a “corporate blog” and not try to hide that (the blogosphere hates fake and so should you!). One example is GM FastLane blog [http://fastlane.gmblogs.com//], it doesn’t appear to be linked from the GM corporate site (please correct me if I am wrong) but clearly features the GM logo, links back to the official site and is mostly written by GM executives.
Not linking prevents what I call “traffic cannibalization”. All the traffic going to your blog is going to add to your overall visibility and potentially increase the traffic to your core site and not simply divert traffic already going to it. You are probably spending a significant amount of your marketing budget to drive traffic to your core site. Each click to it has a precise cost and you are working hard to decrease that cost while increasing the quality of the leads. Seeing that traffic go to a “non e-commerce enabled” section could not be the best use of your internal resources.
The other factor you should take into account is the risk of “blog spam” (including, in particular, meaningless comments advertising competitors or comments trashing your brands or products). This might be also the right strategy if you want to truly create a “buzz”. Only people “in the know” will learn about your blog and are more likely to share it with others. Last if you have doubts about it or are not fully committed, it might be the safest way. That way, if you decide to terminate the experience at some point, your core site won’t suffer.


Option 2: Link (example Stonyfield Farm– see highlight from their corporate home page below)
Based on my experience, most corporate blogs are linked from their original corporate sites. In most cases, it is a link from the “About” section. For example, Google Corporate blog [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/] is accessible from the “More Google” section under “About Google”. The benefit of linking is that you are just opening a new window into your company, a more personal one with the voices of the various people writing post and customers or partners writing comments. You are also adding a completely new content section that could prove useful to promote new ideas, test concepts or highlight new features of your product. It sends a clear message about the culture you want to establish: open, direct, and dynamic. I think this is the right strategy if you are mostly about content (and not commerce) and I think it is also best when your blog is maturing (lots of posts, proven interesting content…). Over time, as blogs become more mainstream, I think this is going to also be simply a “must” have section for most corporate sites.

So, based on your objectives and your experience, what do you think?